Poetry

Meredith Drum is an atomic bomb, a puppet, is confetti and napalm. Maybe she’s a peony grown annually for the flower show. This year’s first-prize installation, a Hiroshima Imperial Hotel room shattered, bouquets wetting the beds. Through the woods, in darkness obscuring our feet, she leads a few thieves. Foxfire on the trees. She rubs…

at my head and my heart, knife-tips green in a gasoline-doused garden. From the tire store behind the house, leering mechanics glaze my window with saliva. I sit at the end of the couch and point my finger angrily, wag it in the face of forever. I sit back on my haunches and sniff the…

At the Delano, the flags are flying half-mast, Honoring the workers released from debt and poverty By the death of parents, by murder, freed by inheritance. “We’ve killed them all,” shout the street cleaners Marching through the lobby with bloodstained hands. Chambermaids wrap themselves like brides in the damask drapes, “We poisoned ours, their miserly…

High Lonesome tipped back his hat and his horses snorted. Maybelle nodded, her teacher’s smile a wild azalea in miles of cactus. My uncle’s buckboard groaned to a stop, in town for flour and grease and beans. All that, decades ago, before he taught me how to cowboy. Five summers we broke broncs, patched fences…

Sleeping in your Harlem apartment, I lie on the bed by the window to the airshaft, a dark flume cutting the center of the building, a pigeon’s alley from basement to roof. My head on the sill, I stretch my hands out. You’re in the next room at the upright, winning a young composer’s prize….

The fuzz knows the whiz and vice versa. This leads to cooperation. Your average dick is on the shake. A little jack will make him right. Count on a C-note per man per day; if there’s no bad beefs, you’re okay. Once you’ve fixed the bull, even when a mark blows, he’ll give you a…

I. Frigg’s Linchpin Vinyl spinning, midnight pimping in Mick’s gin mill, my lips mining this fish fry, till my thigh minx Iris flits hips with Jimmy. His pigmy mind thinking I’m blind, thinking bilk, grinding his milt digit with Iris’s fig. I’ll chill his smirk, slit his midriff. My fist’s flying, his spit’s flinging. I’m…

We are not scaled. We do not boast horns, or quills, or wooly coats. Our skin is pliable and thin. No fangs or scales conceal our throats. Worms regrow their missing tails, though tail is all they know of limb. A cat can close her inner eye. Ants hide beneath their skeletons. But humans, scant…

Sent for by mail, a chameleon waits with the rest of the freight for a name. Our name. We risk fraud for what arrives in 8–10 weeks: a limp form, silent at first, but alive. Guaranteed it will improve, we allow for quiet, for its remove in the terrarium: haven’t we summoned nature to our…